Houdini Alembic Rop Expression in Filename

Deadline
1

I’m trying to decide the best course of action. In line 868-869 of SubmitHoudiniToDeadlineFunctions.py there exists this if statement:

if output and output != "COMMAND":
                            fileHandle.write( "Output=%s\n" % output.unexpandedString() )

The problem with this switch is that the Alembic ROP I am trying to process has an expression in the file name and not a path. This wouldn’t be an issue if the person who wrote this had used eval() instead of unexpandedString() but I’m hesitant to change until I understand the reason behind the use of unexpandedString() here.

Can anyone shed light on this issue for me?

thanks so much!

cheers,
Brendan

2

We have changed this to an expanded string, because it is not very useful as an expression. Just make sure to preserve a $F4 when expanding the string, otherwise it gets baked to a single frame, which seems to affect rendering.

You can see how this is used in Houdini/Houdini.py around line 115. Basically there is some replacing of slashes, and in the end the value is passed as -o to the render script hrender_dl.py. In the render script the output path is set on the ROP to be rendered. So keep in mind all consequences of this.